Are You…Enthusiastic?!?

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Consider the word “enthusiast.”

That word even graces the title bar of your browser when you point it to the ExtremeTech home page: “Deep Technology for Enthusiasts and Professionals.” But it’s a word that’s rapidly losing any real meaning. In the past, enthusiast denoted a person who was passionate about a hobby. The word also implied a certain exclusivity. After all, if everyone does it, are we all enthusiasts?

Probably not.

Still, it can be a useful word when really describing people who do care passionately about what they do. But the word by itself means little—it really needs a descriptive: “performance enthusiast”, “game enthusiast” or “stuffed penguin doll enthusiast.” As our title bar heading implies, we’re the site for people who care about technology, and we try to span a fairly wide range of the technologies we care about.

However, as a word takes hold, beware the marketing departments that notice that word, and begin to use it. These days, when I talk to various companies, and they use the word “enthusiast,” I can hear the “ka-ching!” of cash registers emanating from between their ears. The thinking goes that an enthusiast is a drooling slave to their passions, and will spend any amount of money to achieve some goal. In the case of companies like Nvidia, ATI, AMD, and Intel, that usually means spending gobs of cash on top-of-the-line gear that’s only marginally faster than one step down from the top. (I suppose that means that PlayStation 3 buyers will be “Sony enthuisasts???”

Plus, as marketing people often do, they dilute the word. They’ll use it interchangeably when discussing performance, gaming, home theater and any number of other arenas of interest. There are often implicit assumptions that all enthusiasts are alike. For example, let’s take an encounter I recently had with a recent marketing guy from Nvidia. I’m leaving his name out, because he’s a pretty good guy, and he does seem to care about what he’s doing—a sort of “marketing enthusiast,” if you will.

Marketing guy: [Holds up motherboard] Note the nifty green fan on the chipset!

Me: [Raising my hand] How loud is the fan? Some chipset fans make a loud whining noise.

Marketing guy: Hmm. We never measured the noise level. But it’s green!

I don’t mean to single out Nvidia, because many other tech companies are equally culpable. This brings me to my next point.

Sometimes interests intersect.

For example, I do care quite a bit about performance. But I also don’t want my PCs to sound like the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. So both noise level and performance are important. Monkeys will fly out my posterior before I even think about the color of a chipset fan, however.

Now, it’s okay to create high-priced gear for the fanatic, if you give them something that they crave. An example of something someone could care about is AMD and Intel leaving their top-end CPUs (FX series and Extreme Edition) multiplier unlocked. (Though I would maintain that serious overclockers like to take midrange or even low-end processors and see just how far they can be pushed.)

Another example is Nvidia and Corsair cooperating on “SLI memory.” Ensuring that the settings to overclock your memory are built into the SPD on a memory module is a good thing, as anyone who has painstakingly adjusted voltage settings can attest. The proposed standard doesn’t prevent people from experimenting, but it gives them a more useful starting point.

(Of course, “SLI” is starting to become overused by Nvidia. There’s this little phenomenon called “brand dilution” they might want to read up on. “SLI memory”, indeed.)

There’s one last problem with pitching to enthusiasts: the grognard effect.

The term grognard originally referred to loyal veterans of Napoleon’s armies who had earned the right to complain. Loosely translated, grognard means “grumbler.” The term was later applied to wargamers who were extremely picky about perceived lack of realism and historical accuracy in board wargames, and were quite vocal about it.

As companies try to use the “enthusiast” pitch to appeal to a wider audience, they run the risk of alienating that core of geeks who really do care about performance, or image quality, or gaming. To pick on Nvidia one more time, I recently heard one marketing person gush about “widening the enthusiast base.”

Someone should tell them that if you try to be all things to all people, you may just end up satisfying no one.

This week on ExtremeTechIt’s WinHEC week, and Loyd is off to Seattle to check out what’s going on at Microsoft’s annual gabfest for hardware. Jason Cross, Victor Loh and Robert Heron will take on podcast duties this week.

In addition to Loyd’s report from Hoople… er, WinHEC, we’ve got previews of new processors and chipsets, and Jeremy Atkinson takes a look at free (yes, free) music services. Check back often, and don’t forget this week’s DLTV.